Scene, tense changes and the non flowing flow are (mostly) intentional. I also already know it is not very good but it wants to be published for some reason. Title is from the song Snuff, which may have influenced this.
So break yourself against my stones
Three weeks after Peter's divorce is finalized she moves out, back to the dark flat that she refused to consider selling. Back to the place with the violent red walls and a past that makes him uncomfortable. But she carries it all in the tightness of her jaw, the hollowness of her eyes and into his life even when she lies within the safety of his bed.
He has a son, precocious yet innocent who has already lost too much. Carla would tear herself apart if she knew how. She smokes his cigarettes while glaring at nothing and wears shoes with angry names. They can not exist in the same world and survive. Yet he never asked her to leave even after he catches her hunched over an expensive bottle of whiskey like it's a dare.
He was too disgusted to be tempted himself. After they had tried so hard at having an ever after he could not watch as she did everything she could to destroy it. And then he felt guilty for blaming her. Frank was the one who was destroying them by breaking her.
Sometimes he wonders if there would have even been a 'them' if not for that violent rapist. And then he feels guilt renewed with a burning intensity that eats through the lining of his gut. His breakfast is too greasy and he leans his forehead against the damp bathroom tiles, fighting the urge to vomit because his own addictions lead to him taking advantage of a woman who was trying to rebuild herself upon his strained foundations.
She was like whiskey, straight; each shot startling and stealing his breath. The first time he is inside her he thought he might die at the feel of her.
He thought he could pinpoint the moment it stopped being about saving her in the press of her tongue and the clashing of teeth. The bitterness of her skin, her guttural moans as her head falls back and her eyes close make him better, they make him powerful when emotionally he is so far out of his depth they might all drown.
Yet he could not let her go, not completely.
Ken had shaken his head once again filled with disappointment with his offspring. He had watched his daughter in law collect her almost son with bloodshot eyes and tear stained cheeks. The only comfort he could offer, a strong hand on her shoulder that he hoped could give her strength.
Leanne visibly wavers for a moment but she grips the bewildered child's hand tightly. She refuses to look at the father of the man who broke her heart as if he had been a part of it. He hates the destruction his family leaves in their paths. 'Why do people use destruction as an excuse to destroy?' Ken wished that he could hold himself apart from human nature.
There was never was a memorial service for Tony, and she had not been able to stomach the hypocrisy of saying goodbye to Liam. Carla had isolated herself from the grandness of Paul's funeral. Striding amidst headstones over the dew soaked lawn in her black boots. The heels sticking into the soft ground like a knife into a body. She'd wanted to kill them all over again for what they had done to her.
'We are delicate creatures. We make it heavy. People need a weight for things…so they make their own.' Barry had whispered to his wife as she alternated between wailing and glaring. The winter wind strips them both colourless but she can at least sneer at this.
'The coldest thing in the graveyard is not always the corpse.' Helen had spoken her words forcefully, pronounced them into his ear but the wind catches them and scatters them like cut dry grass. She is almost charitable when she imagines cutting the tendons in the other woman's calves so at least her ankles would not have to suffer.
None of them talked about that day once it had been done.
Carla did not talk about the jurors; all lined up in neat little rows all looking at her with matching expressions of doubt and judgment. She heard before it was ever uttered out loud.
She often catches faces of people she vaguely knows shift into the same brittle expression as if they wore distorted angry clown masks.
Michelle and Maria bluster and protect her as much as they can. They somehow end up sisters by default and she thinks secretly their faces slide and they too doubt. They can tell by the way she stands legs apart, hips thrust out, that she did not believe there were any remains of the past watching over.
"It's like being haunted by the wrong fucking ghosts." She says (Her ghosts are all alive. By association she feels closer to death.)
There's a child that needs her patience and understanding or maybe for her just to fade away only she can't remember how to be soft. Her insides feel like twisted shrapnel and she imagines blackness where her heart used to be.
Little Simon seems to have permanently grazed knees and she decides that all pain led fundamentally to the same place.
Peter visits and tries to take her alcohol. At work Hayley stutters and fumbles to find the words that could make any of it the tiniest bit better. She wishes they would just let her pull her body apart in peace.
It's pathetically easy in the end, like the surprising convenience of decent screw tops on nice enough wine. A fifteen minuet walk into the rougher side of town and two twenty pound notes later there is a small bag of white powder in the pocket of her darkest coat.
And if her mother had never blessed her with much wisdom she at least taught her this. She locks herself within the pubs bathroom cubical and cuts a perfect line upon her compact mirror. Nose to nose with her own reflection was unnerving as it was brilliantly honest. She catches the hint of crow's feet around her eyes and panics.
She snorts half a line before she chokes on the dust and her own swallowed tears.
She flushes the rest and it's not even enough to make her high just empathises the nothingness within.
Stella had never realised how fiercely she would want to protect her first born. She wished she had been experienced enough to voice her suspicions before everything had fell down. There were lies upon lies till the beacon of truth had burned out.
She watched Carla leave the toilets taking the long route to the bar so to avoid all human contact. Stella is used to seeing bodies who have destroyed themselves in search for proof; she sees the other woman's pupils, dark like oil spills and thinks 'Silly girl there is no proof here.'
There is no forgiveness for the harm caused but the mother regrets that she disbelieved the way the other woman was broken.
Later Peter takes her home (His flat, her flat neither a home). He tries to shield her from the whispers and gossip but she glares angrily at him so he lets her walk unaided in her five inch heels.
He remembers the look she'd regarded him with when the trail was lost, her eyes unflinching. He thinks again 'Now I know what it is like to break down on a cellular level.'
She starts shedding clothes as soon as he shuts the door. He remembers when he used to feel pride along with lust when she first trusted him with her nakedness. She doesn't even stumble when she slips out of her knickers in her state of drunkenness.
He would have lectured her, it had been the plan. But there was something in the way she stood, like Salvador Dali's vision of a ballerina that made him let her go. The bathroom door closed and he is left alone with the sound of running water and the piles of her clothes. Peter pours himself a glass of wine because they at least still share that sin.
He distinctly remembered his father reading him the myth of the phoenix two nights after his mother's death. He thinks perhaps the story was misleading. After all, it isn't the dead that burn. It is the tired.
Carla emerges a short time later with a towel wrapped over her breasts and her hair in a limp messy bun. She wants to feel vindicated or sad when she catches him drinking; mostly she knows she has tell tale eyes and colourless skin and Peter looks at her as if she's ugly and maybe she is. She feels gaunt, the way a starving person must feel, as though their skin is afraid.
But he closes the space between them and silently unwraps her and lets the towel drop to the floor. Her pupils are like eclipses and wild and with bare feet she finally has to look up at him. She is still slightly damp from the shower water and his fingers stick to her hot skin as though he and she are made of different materials.
He just hoped that one act would not be about destruction.